The Ritual Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos

Freddy Decreus

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429769092
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Categoría: Dirección y producción teatrales

The Ritual Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos outlines the story of the Athenian-based Attis Theatre and the way its founder and director, Theodoros Terzopoulos, introduced bio-energetic presences of the body on the stage, in an attempt to redefine and reappraise what it means today not only to have a body, but to fully be a body.

Terzopoulos created a very specific attitude towards life and death, and it is this broad perspective on energy and consciousness that makes his work so appealing both to a general public and to students of arts, theatre and drama. Freddy Decreus' study charts the career of Greece's most acclaimed theatre director and provides a spiritual and philosophic answer in times where former Western meta-narratives have failed.

1Unfathomable faces

Theodoros Terzopoulos and his Attis Theatre stage incredible faces, faces I never saw before, faces that forever will haunt and disturb me. Threatening and demonic appearances they are, breathing and voicing in unseen positions, stammering and stuttering in unheard rhythms and tonalities. White-faced ‘masks’ that seem to belong to another world, to the Nether World, to a landscape of a long-forgotten Memory. Strange faces, belonging to protagonists who step into alienating contexts, both express the tragic burden of life and the unbearable lightness of being. Sometimes they come close to the rigidity and sternness of Greek tragic masks, but then again, they pop up in very frivolous, even clownish, situations. The white makeup, grown in the course of time into a second skin of the actors, beloved trademark that the company as a whole gave its special artistic distinctiveness, led them (and us!) through unknown and unexplored abysses of the mind, asking the same basic philosophical questions all over again: Who are we, where are we heading to, what is our identity, what is the price we have to pay for being human, to what kind of consciousness is all of this leading us? From old to new skin, what a challenging and liberating step, what a radical and innovating change, what an unbelievable adventure that starts with white ashes, red ribbons and black outlined eyes, simple aesthetic transformations introducing significant modifications on an existential level!

Among the unfathomable faces staged by the Attis Theatre, one cannot forget a petrified queen’s face discovering the head of her son in Bacchae (1986), grotesque smiles in a Brechtian parable about Money (1998), bloodshot eyes in the many evocations of Dionysos (esp. the one staged in Bogota, 1998), concurring laughs and tears (klausigelos) in Ajax, the Madness (2004) and Trojan Women (2017), solemn and hieratical looks in Persians (2006), decapitated heads as the price of the revolution in Mauser (2009), seducing tongues in Alarme (2010), ‘a smile as engraved by a razor’ in Encore (as the programme noted, 2016). In this theatre, I met a flock of cruel ghosts that I would not like to meet on the corner of the street, think of the sharpened white eyes of Alexander Mokhov playing Oidipous (St. Petersburg, Alexandrinsky Theatre, 2006), the ominously shaking head and hands of Tassos Dimas as the personification of Horror in Nosferatu (Perm, Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Theatre, 2014) or the ferocious expressions on the sculpted face of Antigone (Jennifer Kidwell) in Antigone (at the Wilma, 2015). As Marianne McDonald noted, the director, ‘like Dionysus, can be at one moment life affirming, at another deadly’, and yes, effectively ‘(h)is actors’ smiles can wound’ (2000: 15).

Figure 1.1Bacchae by Euripides, Freiburg, 1987, Ihnenhof Alte Uni, with Sofia Michopoulou (Photo Lothar Sitzek).

Figure 1.2Mauser by Heiner Müller, Wroclaw, 2012, Grotowski Institut, with Bartosz Bielenia (Photo Miroslaw Giernatowski).

By all means, this creator of an astonishing procession of ghosts and phantoms perpetuated an age-old search for identity and meaningfulness, a highly estimated goal in times of a threatening spiritual discomfort. At this very moment, when statistics of suicide all over the world are out of proportion and the multi-headed monsters Rage, Revenge and Violence never get tired to reveal the shadow side of man, traditional ways of self-interpretation (myth, religion, politics) fail to bring relief and no longer succeed in unifying societies. Mental health, social well-being and political utopia suffer from the same diseases, no longer able to offer larger perspectives that might overcome contradictions, to bring people home or to provide visions of totality.

In a rather strange and unusual way, the inscrutable white faces of the Attis actors summarise all these problematic fields of discomfort and human suffering, without dogmatising or imposing one-sided answers. The artificial white skin they wear, this ritual mask tried out in so many aesthetic settings, just a thin layer of cream meant to remain invisible, simple means like these evoke a mystical haze that completely disorients and disturbs our normal perceptions. However, it is precisely this distance and these awe inspiring feelings of alienation that call for the opposite reaction, since it is through an outer distancing effect that an inner affinity and kinship are made possible. Indeed, the visual gap that this ‘mask’ creates almost at first sight, provokes a breach in the ongoing process of time, inviting to descend into a state of introspection and to explore the mystery of the invisible and unnameable. If we are fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of this kind of exposure, when Time suddenly stops and Space no longer matters, we might be able to see both ourselves and the Other in a different perspective. In a situation like this, brief as it may be, we suddenly experience what it is we share as human beings, born in a world that needs to be elucidated by us. It will be here, exactly here, in the distance that separates word and thing, Subject and Object, Ego and Shadow, man and the reality he inhabits, that the actor will point at ways to develop other types of human consciousness that no longer suffer the disadvantages of a disembodied psyche.

But how to imagine a world where the gaping mouth of Death constantly devours those who live an unworthy Life, where metamorphoses surprise characters in the tragic uncertainty of their being, where a spiritual geometry reduces the gaze and invites us to limit our expectations to the most simple and humble dots, lines and angles? A spiritual landscape like this is not served by realistic props and details, only by repetitive lines, colours, gestures and shapes, or, as Giorgos Sampatakakis pointed out:

Terzopoulos’ only accessories have historically been knives, cleavers, stones, high-heels, pom-poms, coffins, buckets, swords, and the like; the outfits of Eros and Thanatos, so to say.

(2016: 3)

Abstract settings like these are the indicated spaces where Theodoros situates his version of the human person, calling upon him, in an operation of (controlled) ekstasis, to leave behind his old Self and to make everything new. Instead of speaking the lines of a psychological or realistic character, mouths are first and foremost used as a central instrument of the breathing circle. The mouth of a performer, above all, has to inhale and exhale, follow the flow of the breath within each physical action and invite the wandering mind to penetrate deeper and deeper into the body, till the moment is reached that body and mind come together and reach a state of concentration that controls the breath. Still, this same mouth needs to express sounds, words and sentences, although often enough just used to babble, to voice intonations and vocalisations. From the dawn of times, this mouth tried out the physical act of self-expression and in the end, storytelling itself helped man to invent himself. This is the basic situation evoked at the Wilma (2015), when Antigone was started up by a kind of furious and inarticulate speech held by Paolo Musi, leader of the chorus, a terrifying meat clever suspended above his head. Primary chaos always had to be ordered through the shivering movements of this tiny mouthpiece, lips had to move relentlessly, thoughts and feelings had to invent stories of survival that needed to be told over and over again. And was it not the same Paolo Musi, who in Eremos (2007), a text written by Carlo Michelstaedter, kept talking and talking, using this same mouth to escape from Nothingness, knowing all too well that, as long as his lips ran incessantly, the living dead person he was still had a chance not to be buried on the spot. What an existential relief when another mouth, the mouth of the director himself seated in front of him, started to sing lamentations from his Pontic homeland. Two craving mouths met each other, one fighting against the internal darkness, the other commemorating the love that always will remain.

The face of the Attis performer is the setting where it all happens. It is here that ‘the Eye of Dionysos’ abodes and where Energy in all possible forms and functions is called upon. Therefore, the unfathomable faces that the Attis theatre stages, are Dionysian doubles, Jungean shadows and means to alienate certain aspects of the own psyche, yet also mirrors that ask to be recognised as vehicles of a universal life force, vital instruments of an integrated cosmic vision that bridges the gaps humans are supposed to meet. Therefore, the Dionysian faces set up by the actors of the Attis Theatre are multileveled constructions that call upon both actor and spectator to remember a number of existential problems that all of us are bound to meet.

In what follows, I discuss a number of bodily traces that inhabit, all concurrently, these strange psychophysical landscapes we call ‘faces’.

Let me start with the question why I personally feel so strongly attracted to them, or, to put it the other way around, why vaguely but very explicitly, I also feel so terrified by them! Why do they repel and fascinate me at the same time? Is it mainly the recognition of instincts that reign here so fiercely and the contact with my own biological heritage that puzzle me? If this is the case, Richard Schechner was not wrong after all to draw a ‘ritual tree’ that situated human ritualisation along the same lines that characterise the activities of the lower species, the genetically fixed ones (insects, fish), the fixed and free ones (birds, mammals) and those able to make social contact (nonhuman primates) (1993). Following this line of thought, it is obvious that many spastic theatrical bodies that populate the Attis theatre recall my own paradoxical belonging to the animal side of life. Did not diverging schools, such as sociobiology, somatic psychology or postural integration (Keleman, 1985; Painter, 1986; Burkert, 1996), argue that

‘we can learn something about human ritual (and myth) by studying animal behaviour’ and that we ‘are too ready to assume that a wide gulf separates human and beast, as if we lived entirely in the mind, while animals lived simply by drives and instincts’.

(Csapo, 2005: 164)

The chorus in Bacchae (1986) was one long-standing tribute and reference to the animal that abides in us and got cultural recognition through the Dionysian affiliations we made of it. In Alarme (2010), both queens moved like snakes, hissing and sizzling as reptiles do, sometimes assuming the ancient dignity of immobile Sphinxes, mostly however evoking the hidden cruelty that is supposed to characterise mythical monsters. Threatening open mouths warned for their lust to swallow, long red tongues seduced and anaesthetised, exactly the way old lacerating monsters were lurking in the ambush. And how shivering was the howling of a dog in Amor (2013), when a public auction, in an era of deep economic crisis, laid bare the most profound forms of alienation and manipulation, thwarting all feelings of real love, reducing human longings to the survival instincts of an animal. Final depreciation of the human sort, or an ultimate attempt to keep up some dignity, be it in the animal realm? Did an escape into the animal side of nature not please Hekabe, when given to Odysseus in the aftermath of the Trojan War, this queen mother who preferred a return to instinctive patterns to a body doomed to live in slavery? Like insects, Sophia Hill and Tassos Dimas crawled from darkness into the light, staring at each other like threatening snakes, entwining and then again strangling each other and turning into hieratical sphinxes that lifted glittering knives against each other (Lethe, 2003).

In many Attis productions, this vacillating position between the human and the inhuman, between man and animal, debouched into a sublime synthesis by the intriguing musical compositions made by Panayiotis Velianitis, real soul mate of Theodoros since 1991, one of the first Greek composers of computer and computer aided music. His music, as it extends from acoustic to electroacoustic and mixed media, created many acoustic climates where the uncanny and the unpredictable found a home, a hybrid mode of representing a world that constantly was in transition. The smaller the productions were, like the three little pearls of Theodoros’ most recent trilogy, Alarme (2010), Amor (2012) and Encore (2016), the more pronounced the impact of his acoustic artistry was, ranging from the howling sounds of nature to real tango’s, from disconcerting human voices to stylised musical landscapes. Yet, some of his major compositions like the sound installation Enopae (Delphi, 2018), conceived as a sonic substrate for an open air exchange with the surrounding forests, also had a more philosophic and existential colour, as far as they brought the collective unconscious into contact with global cultural codes.

Figure 1.3Alarme, composition of Theodoros Terzopoulos based on the correspondence of Mary, Queen of Scots, and Queen Elizabeth I’, Athens, 2010, Attis Theatre, with Aglaia Pappa and Sophia Hill (Photo Johanna Weber).

Yet, how abstract and formalised productions ever were, there was always this disturbing and alienating monster hiding deep inside us, the Hydra. ‘The Hydra is in us, the Hydra is us’, was the conclusion of the many Herakles plays that Theodoros staged. Just as the monstrous water snake bred in the marsh of Lerna emerged with nine heads, bound to grow anew perpetually, human combats with the monster, since primeval times, recalled the darkest fears we continually have to face. Are Medeia’s revenge, Aias’ fury and Phaidra’s deadly plans not tokens of the old reptilian brain, this primitive, instinctive brain function that copes with aggression, anger and fear in both mammals and humans (MacLean, 1990)? And are the threatening monologues of Medeia, Elektra and Phaidra, so well rendered by Alla Demidova in Tristia (2000), really so far away from the ruthlessness of that other Elektra, the graphic novel character made popular by that comic books artist Frank Miller, who created a warrior nearly exclusively obeying to her ‘reptilian brain’ function? Do I feel uncomfortable in the presence of these white faced Attis actors, because they remind me of the oldest layers of my own evolutionary history?

Surely what in the course of human history looked ungraspable, unnameable, and indomitable dimensions that always evoked feelings of primitivism and that hinted at the uncomfortable presence of radical Otherness, at a certain moment of history had to be transformed into more familiar aspects of human identity. The unknown had to assume human properties, often enough through a long lasting mediation of animal traits. The need to adopt a complete alien appearance befell princess Io, daughter of the Argivian king Inachos, when holy terror seized her (an appealing Sophia Hill in so many Io and Prometheus Bound versions, from the Festival of Argos, 1996, to the Promethiade, in Elefsina, Istanbul, Essen, 2010), mouth open, a pair of upward looking and terrified eyes vainly searching for help and understanding. Turned into a heifer and stung by a maddening gadfly sent by Hera, the supreme goddess, Io symbolised this moment of existential hesitation and exile that begged for explanation. In situations like these, as Hans Blumenberg suggested in his work on myth that I will use continually, Arbeit am Mythos (1979; Work on Myth, 1985),

man came close to not having control of the conditions of his existence and what is more important, believed that he simply lacked control of them.

(1985: 3–4)

Agave and Io, Herakles and Aias, stupefied faces, silenced and stunned by incredible things that happened to them, are typical examples of a ‘limiting case’, an experience so full of ambiguity and oddness, that all efforts to understand them simply fall short. This is what Blumenberg called a situation of fundamental ‘Angst’, not just anxiety, but something ...